


Those Who Justice Does Not Serve

by KatieNuss



Series: For A Moment [4]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Assassin!Robin, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 11:45:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6468913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatieNuss/pseuds/KatieNuss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Renegade and Cheshire take a job that changes Dick's outlook, and hits home for Jade.</p><p>AU in which, after suffering torture and breaking at the hands of the Light, Dick runs away from his family and his team due to shame. Cheshire takes him under her wing and teaches him another way to live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Who Justice Does Not Serve

It’s the first time he felt okay, after a job. It isn’t really a reflection of how many times he’s done it, or how long it’s been since the first time, though he supposes that could be a contributing factor. It is a matter of quality over quantity—even though he realizes how messed up that sounds.

It isn’t how _many_ throats he’s cut, it was _whose_ throat.

He and Jade have been contracted for a revenge killing.

At first, the idea makes Dick squeamish, and he wants desperately to tell their client that revenge won’t make him feel better, justice will. He wants to reassure this grieving father that the police will handle it, and that the proper authorities will make it right.

He resists this reflex the entire time that he and Jade are in the man’s presence discussing the details of the job, and doesn’t express his feelings on the situation until the two of them are alone again. He asks Jade how someone could think that revenge is better than justice. Of course this is a rhetorical question, but she answers anyway, much to his surprise.

“Because justice doesn’t serve everyone, little bird.” There is something haunting about the way her eyes darken when she says it. Like she knows from experience, and it sends chills down his spine.

When he researches the man later, he figures out what Jade meant. Peter Raegan’s daughter had been raped a year prior. When she found out that she was pregnant with her rapist’s child, she committed suicide. The doer, Michael Kramer, is a serial rapist— but was released on a technicality. Prosecutors refuse to try again.

The next night, when Dick feels the blade of his knife slide across Kramer’s throat, and the light goes out in his smug eyes, Dick feels…okay.

He knows, for some inexplicable reason, that he can live with this, that it won’t tear him up inside like so many others.

When everything is said and done, Peter Raegan gives them a tearful, relieved thanks.

It’s surreal—the whole experience. It goes against everything he was ever taught by Batman, by his family, by his friends, by the League. He actually feels like he did right by Peter Raegan and his daughter. That this is a good thing. And it’s hard to wrap his head around it all.

Everything he knows is screaming that something is wrong with him, that he shouldn’t feel good about what he just did. It’s the same voice that reassures him after every job that he’s a bad person, that he’s failed his family and his friends, and that he’s failed as Robin. That he’s a murderer. But a newer, younger part of him is arguing that he’s _not_ in the wrong.

As he thinks about it now, he wonders if there was any other way that Raegan _could_ have seen justice, if there was anything Robin could have done differently, any way he could have given Raegan peace. Honestly, he’s not sure. Robin could catch the bad guys, but Renegade, he could _stop_ them.

Michael Kramer would never hurt another person.

Killing him was a permanent solution that Robin could never offer. Robin couldn’t promise that Kramer would never hurt another person.

But Renegade? He could, and he made sure of it.

When he thinks of it this way, he doesn’t feel so bad, he doesn’t feel hollow, like he used to. He thinks that maybe…being Renegade isn’t so bad, that he can make a real, noticeable difference.

What he does can _mean_ something, like it did when he was Robin. Maybe it can mean more.

“Jade, how do you come by these jobs?” Dick asks, picking at the fraying comforter beneath his crossed legs. He should be sharpening his short swords, but he was thinking too much. Jade had given them to him a month or so ago. A belated birthday present, she’d said. He hadn’t realized at first, how she’d known. But when he’d asked Roy, he rolled his eyes and told Dick that he should turn on a television once in a while—that there’d been a special on Dick Grayson’s disappearance on his December 1st birthday. He turned fifteen that day.

“Oh, word of mouth. Leads from colleagues.” She smirks a bit, because Cheshire doesn’t play well with others, and ‘colleagues’ isn’t exactly the most accurate way to describe her relationships with others of their profession. He wonders when it became ‘their profession’, not just hers.

“So…if I wanted to find some on my own?” he watches her face carefully, not sure if that was the right thing to say. Renegade and Cheshire are (almost) like partners now, and he likes to believe that Dick and Jade are allies, maybe even friends, or so he hopes. He’s not looking to jeopardize that by becoming her competition.

She’s really all Dick’s got, as twisted as that is.

“You’d have to find your own channels, little bird.” She raises an eyebrow at him, still sharpening the blade in her hand, and he isn’t sure what to make of it. “I can’t be expected to look after you for the rest of your life, can I?” His heart skips a beat, and for a moment he’s worried about what she’ll do next.

And then she smirks at him, and the weight slips off his shoulders. He knows that look better now than he used to. It means she’s playing. “It’s just…I feel good about what we did for Peter Raegan.”

She stops what she’s doing and throws her head back to laugh. “You feel _good_ about it?” She looks as amused as a patron at a comedy club. “Well, isn’t that a _gem_ ,” she taunts, resting her chin on her hand.

“I do!” He’s defensive all of a sudden, and he throws his arms out, exasperated. “It’s like you said, the system doesn’t always work, it doesn’t always help the people it should and…doing that job _helped_ him. I could see it.” She looks impressed with this conclusion that he’s drawn, but he’s _not_ pleased with her mocking him. “I think I could do something good. Help people like Peter who’ve exhausted all other options. People like you.”

He instantly regrets saying it, and he _knows_ it hit home, though not why. He’d suspected early on that she’d been able to relate to Peter’s plight. He _knows_ he’s right, because she looks like she might actually kill him. Not slap him around, _actually_ murder him, and then dump his body somewhere not even Roy could find him.

“There was something personal about this case for you, wasn’t there?” His voice is quiet, nearly inaudible, and he wants to break his gaze away from hers but in the event she does decide to slaughter him that would be a poor choice.

She stares at him for a long while, and he thinks about making a preemptive strike, though with a sword in her hand he wouldn’t be likely to win. Maybe locking himself in the bathroom and crawling out the window. That’s feasible, he’s still thin enough to squeeze through, though his shoulders may have gotten a little broader in recent months…

“Do you know who my first kill was?” She says it meaningfully, and returns to her task, dragging the metal of her blade against the stone in her left hand. Her voice breaks him out of his rambling thoughts and he’s brought back to the conversation.

His curiosity flares and against his better judgement he answers. “No.”

“It was my father.” She says simply, as though he should understand immediately. He doesn’t.

“But, I thought—”

“Sportsmaster, _Lawrence Crock_ , is _not_ my father.” She spits his name and her lips curl into a sneer, as though she’s been insulted. “I find it difficult to turn down jobs that remind me of my first.” Her voice is calm again, and Dick listens this time when the voice in his head tells him that maybe it’s better not to respond.

He takes hold of one of his swords and turns it in his hands, watching the light of the lamp beside him dance across the edge of the blade. It’s slow, but his brain begins assessing the situation.

She never turns down jobs that remind her of her first.

This time, they killed Michael Kramer, a serial rapist, and her first kill was her own father. If Kramer reminded Jade of her _real_ father, not of Sportsmaster…

“Jade….was your mother…?” Dick bites his lip, and only risks a quick glance at her downturned face.

“She couldn’t bear to give me up.” Jade speaks so softly it’s almost a whisper. She sounds…sad. More melancholy than he’s ever heard her.

His stomach twists, because it can’t be easy to know that about your family, to know that you are the result of an act of violence. He wonders, for a moment if Artemis knows, and he knows he can’t be sure. She never talked about her family, because she’d never wanted the team to know who they were. She was ashamed of them, he supposed, ashamed of what they had done. Dick only knew because he was Robin. Robin knew everything. Even when he wasn’t supposed to.

He feels like this revelation should explain a lot about why Jade is the way she is, the way she feels about Lawrence Crock, the fact that she chose murder-for-hire as a career. But he knows that’s not fair. This is only a small facet of who Jade Nyugen is, just as what happened to his family is only a small part of who _he_ is. He tries not to assume, not to put her into a box, the way he did before he knew her the way he does now, which all things considered isn’t very well at all.

What it does do, is reassure him of this new conclusion, that sometimes killing is a preventative measure.

Dick is almost ashamed, because he knows that Bruce, Batman, would never approve. He would say that Dick has no right to play god, to decide who lives or who dies. He’s not even sure if his parents would be able to accept this new outlook that he seems to be adopting.

But then again, if someone had killed Tony Zucco, his parents might still be alive and Dick wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.

Killing is wrong, he does believe that—and maybe looking at things like this is just a way for his mind to cope with the things he’s been doing, a way to stop him from hating who he has become. But a lot of the things he did as Robin were wrong, too. Lying to everyone he knows about who he is, illegal wiretapping, assault, breaking and entering, destruction of property, all of those things were wrong, too.

Necessary evils.

He realizes that he became Robin because he distrusted the justice system; he didn’t believe that it would make right his parent’s deaths. He didn’t, and doesn’t, believe that it can work on its own. The system is imperfect. Where it couldn’t catch Tony Zucco, Batman and Robin _could_.

But even Batman and Robin can’t help everyone; they can’t help people like Peter Raegan.

As Robin, there’s nothing he could have done.

There was no evidence left to be collected, no one left to question. All options had been exhausted in this case. Everything that could have been done to get justice for Peter Raegan had been done and it had failed.

As Renegade, he can help those who justice does not serve.

And he’s okay with that.


End file.
